by Ryan O'Neill
Allenby, though renowned for his acuity in business matters, could not see how he was spoiling his daughter. He was convinced she was a prodigy; when she was six months old he started to involve her in editorial decisions, reading aloud novels he was considering publishing and rejecting them if Vivian fell asleep within ten minutes. Writers eager to curry Allenby’s favour learned that he never tired of hearing his daughter praised. He once rejected a book about a plucky little girl as “sentimental bilge of the lowest order” but accepted the story six months later when the writer resubmitted it, having made only one alteration: she changed the name of the protagonist to “Little Viv”. Allenby purchased the rights to the “Little Viv” character, and numerous other Little Viv children’s stories followed in elaborately illustrated clothbound editions, with Vivian Allenby modelling for the pictures. Vivian only came to realise that not every little girl had books written about her when she went to school and asked one of her classmates which books in the library she appeared in.
Allenby’s indulgence of his daughter was to have disastrous consequences for Australian literature when, in December 1910, Sydney Steele visited the publisher with the only manuscript of his short-story collection, Charlie Cobb’s Cobbers, which Allenby had promised to publish. Allenby and Steele shared a bottle of whisky to celebrate the new book, before lapsing into unconsciousness in front of the fireplace in the library. Awoken by their laughter, Vivian had slipped downstairs and watched the two men from the doorway until they were asleep. Then she crept into the room and delicately removed the manuscript from Steele’s lap. Though she found his handwriting difficult to decipher, Vivian quickly realised that “Uncle Sydney’s” book was not about her; indeed it featured no character called Vivian at all. Disappointed, she threw the manuscript onto the fire and returned to bed.
Her father’s cries woke her early next morning. The cook and the housemaid had already given notice before Vivian came downstairs and confessed that it was she who had destroyed Steele’s manuscript. When she refused to apologise, her father struck her for the first time in her life and sent her to her room. However, Steele was mollified by the large cheque Allenby gave him, and confident that he could rewrite Charlie Cobb’s Cobbers in just a few weeks. (Tragically, the book was lost for good.) Vivian’s disgrace lasted for only an hour. Lloyd Allenby sat in the draughty hallway beside her locked bedroom door, begging the nine-year-old to forgive him. Only the promise that he would commission Little Viv’s Book of Days, Little Viv’s Favourite Things and Little Viv’s Garden of Verses brought about a rapprochement.
After the twelfth Little Viv book appeared, Vivian demanded more involvement in their composition, and so Allenby would send a writer to talk to Vivian at home, who would then transform her chatter into a book. If Vivian was not pleased with what was written about her, she would tell her father, and the unfortunate writer would be dismissed. However, the series, which had once turned a small profit, soon tried the patience of the reading public, and the commercial failure of Little Viv Tells the Time, Little Viv Goes for a Walk and Little Viv Grows and Grows cost Allenby a considerable amount of money. In 1911 he had the idea of only publishing one copy of each subsequent Little Viv book, which would then be presented to his daughter. To spare her feelings, this new arrangement was kept from Vivian, who continued to believe that thousands of copies of the Little Viv books were being sold every year.
The Little Viv stories published in 1916 provide clues to Vivian’s experiences during her late adolescence: Little Viv Puts On Perfume, Little Viv’s Hand Is Kissed, Little Viv Grows Hair in Peculiar Places and Little Viv Meets an Author. By this time Vivian had grown taller than her father and matured physically so that she appeared years older than she actually was. The writer in Little Viv Meets an Author is assumed to be Addison Tiller, the creator of the popular Homestead stories, whom Vivian met at a party given by Quincy and Claudia Gunn in 1916 to celebrate sales of On Our Homestead reaching 200,000. Little Viv Meets an Author describes Viv’s coquettish attempts to catch the eye of a surly middle-aged writer. There seems little doubt that this meeting led to a sexual relationship between the 42-year-old Tiller and the sixteen-year-old Vivian as early as June 1917, although Tiller’s definitive biography, Addison Tiller: Australia’s Chekhov (1963), makes no mention of it. The textual evidence for their affair is compelling, if circumstantial. July 1917 saw the publication of Little Viv Becomes a Woman. Four months later Tiller’s Off Our Homestead appeared, featuring a short story called “Kissing Kousins” in which Pete Tiller falls in love with his cosmopolitan younger cousin Vi, a “tall, dark-haired girl with fearless black eyes”. The lovelorn Pete eventually declares his feelings for Vi in a passage that the critic Peter Crawley called “the nadir of Australian comedy writing”.
“I love you, Vi!” stammered Pete. “You get under me skin like the quills of a-a-a—”
“Echidna?” Vi smiled, batting her dark eyes at him.
“Nah, I’m not kiddin’ ya!” Pete protested.
Tiller’s biographer, Stephen Pennington, acknowledges that “Kissing Kousins” was a late addition to the collection, the poor sales of which were in large part due to Allenby & Godwin’s failure to promote it. After the publication of Off Our Homestead Tiller was released from his contract with his publisher, and there is no record of him ever speaking with Allenby again.
Allenby let it be known that Little Viv Becomes a Woman would be the last of the Little Viv stories, perhaps a sign of his displeasure at his daughter’s behaviour. When a month of pouting and sulking did not change her father’s mind, Vivian decided on a different approach. If her father would not publish a book featuring her, she would write one herself. Vivian began work on Ivy Van Allbine on her seventeenth birthday, and by the time she had completed her first draft six months later it had acquired the grandiloquent subtitle An Australian Vanity Fair. The novel, a Bildungsroman, follows the romantic adventures of the beautiful and mesmerising young ingénue Ivy, whose charms cause an endless procession of novelists, poets and playwrights to fall at her feet. The plot borrowed heavily from Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911), though without the English novel’s humour or wit. Vivian was convinced that her novel was a masterpiece, but decided that engaging the services of an editor could not hurt. Her father refused her request that he assign one from Allenby & Godwin, so Vivian turned instead to Peter Darkbloom, a young writer from Melbourne whose collection of short stories, The Flyscreen (1915), had been published by Allenby’s firm to respectable reviews. Darkbloom, known to his friends as Pin, had first met Vivian at the same party that had marked the beginning of her relationship with Addison Tiller; although she had barely spoken to him, Pin had become infatuated with her. Grateful for any chance to spend time with her, he agreed to edit her novel for nothing, his first task being to replace the dozens of instances of “Vivian” with “Ivy”. Darkbloom sweated over the manuscript for weeks, but when he returned it with over a thousand suggested alterations and cuts, Vivian burst into tears and ordered him from the house, vowing she would never speak to him again. A dejected Darkbloom returned to Melbourne and tried to lose himself in his writing, the result of which would be the classic novel Dancing in the Shadows (1920).
Ivy Van Allbine: An Australian Vanity Fair was published by Allenby & Godwin, without editorial interference, in June 1919. The novel sold only one hundred and nine copies from a print run of three thousand, and it was rumoured that these were all purchased by Vivian herself. Reviewers were unanimous in their hostility. The Mercury’s critic lamented that George Meredith’s novel had already used the title of The Egoist, as it would have been perfect for Vivian Allenby’s book. The Western Star argued, “If Narcissus had written a novel, it would read much like this one,” while the Antipodean railed, “This is not An Australian Vanity Fair, but rather An Australian Vanity Foul.”
Stung by the criticism, Vivian swore never to write another word of fiction. For months she was not at home to visitors and re
fused all invitations to balls and parties. She suffered from insomnia and lost her appetite, becoming so thin that her anxious father summoned Sydney’s most expensive physicians to examine her. Vivian was a model patient, happy to discuss her symptoms for hours with anyone who cared to listen. Her slow decline appeared as irreversible as it was mysterious, until one morning in March 1920. Vivian’s night nurse had left behind a novel she was reading, and Vivian took it up listlessly, without even glancing at the cover. At the third chapter she was about to throw it aside, when the character of Vivian Allden was introduced. Flirtatious, maddening, quixotic and darkly alluring, the fictional Vivian captured her namesake’s heart within only a few pages. The novel was Dancing in the Shadows by Peter Darkbloom. Though only a minor character, Vivian Allden was rendered immortal by Darkbloom’s desperate passion for Vivian Allenby, the woman who had told him in 1918 that she would never care a pin for him. Vivian read the book throughout that day and stayed up all night to finish it. When she closed the novel she had what she later described as an epiphany: “To write takes talent. To be written about takes genius.” That morning she met her father for breakfast and declared that she was cured.
Darkbloom’s debut novel had sold well, going through four printings in its first year of publication. The reviews were as congratulatory as any writer could wish, though some critics felt that Cecilia Bourne, the ostensible heroine of the novel, was utterly eclipsed by Vivian Allden, marring an otherwise perfectly structured work. Lloyd Allenby, pestered by his daughter, invited Darkbloom to dinner, and the young writer was a frequent visitor thereafter. Within two months, he had proposed to Vivian, who accepted at once, and the couple were married in September 1920. Pin had already finished the handwritten first draft of his next novel, Crossroads at Dawn, a formally ambitious modernist work following the fragmented lives of a group of Australian soldiers on their return from the Great War. When his new wife offered to type out the manuscript for him, he could not have been more pleased. At first, Vivian’s influence on the book was negligible. The unimportant character of Edna Huntingtower, wife of one of the protagonists, was cured of her alcoholism and renamed “Vivian” in the second draft. By the fourth draft, “Vivian” appeared in half of the book’s twenty-six chapters; by the fifth she was no longer a soldier’s wife, but a writer’s, and by the eighth she had become the main character. Pin, though aware Vivian was ruining his novel, felt powerless to stop her. He could refuse his wife nothing, not even her request that he destroy the earliest drafts of the book now retitled For the Love of a Beautiful Woman. Only a few scraps of Crossroads at Dawn survive, and its loss is considered a calamity for Australian literature, only on a par with that of the destruction of the works of Sydney Steele.
The publication of For the Love of a Beautiful Woman in 1922 ended Peter Darkbloom’s career as a novelist and irrevocably damaged his marriage. Vivian never forgave her husband for the novel’s failure; she accused him of deliberately writing badly, wrecking her chance of literary immortality. She briefly considered divorce, but she knew that her father, a Roman Catholic and member of the Knights of St Columba, would disown her if she carried out her threat. Instead she moved into the spare bedroom of their house, utterly ignoring her husband unless visitors were present. Pin found himself unable to begin another novel, and was grateful when he was offered employment at the University of Sydney as a lecturer in English literature. Vivian no longer referred to him, when speaking to her friends, as a writer, but as a teacher, and Pin did not contradict her. He acquired a small measure of attention in academic circles for his critical work, including the seminal comparison of Agatha Christie and Claudia Gunn, “The Mysterious Affair of Literary Styles” (1925), and “The Cries of Polyphemus: Australian Criticism and Frederick Stratford’s Odysseus” (1926), which sought to prove that the Australian novelist had plagiarised James Joyce’s Ulysses. The caustic tone of the latter article was no doubt due at least in part to Vivian’s intimate relationship with Stratford. Stratford’s mammoth novel Odysseus had been submitted to Allenby & Godwin in November 1922, and Lloyd Allenby had sought Peter Darkbloom’s opinion on the manuscript. Pin recognised it as a work of genius, but told Allenby he was certain he had read some of the novel before, serialised in a literary journal during the war. After Pin was introduced to Stratford, his suspicions were confirmed; he could not imagine such a man writing such a book. Allenby ignored Pin’s concerns and Odysseus was scheduled for publication in March 1923. In the meantime, Vivian had come to hear of the manuscript from her father, and she threw a New Year’s Eve party with the express intention of meeting Stratford. The two began an affair shortly afterwards. By the end of January, as Odysseus was going to press, Stratford insisted that the character of Molly Hume be renamed “Vivvy”. Pin, whom Allenby had begged to help copyedit the vast manuscript, realised what the change must have meant but said nothing. His later contention that Odysseus had been almost entirely poached from Ulysses was not a popular one, and was refuted by many eminent Australian critics and academics who had only just crowned Stratford the greatest novelist of the Southern Hemisphere.
Following the publication of “The Cries of Polyphemus”, pressure from Stratfordians led to Pin losing his job at the university. In 1926 the Darkblooms moved to Brisbane, much to Vivian’s dismay, where Allenby’s influence had secured for Pin a position as a tutor in the University of Queensland’s English department. Their home became the centre of artistic life in the city, as Vivian hosted an endless round of dinner parties, poetry readings and debates. During this time she saw her husband rarely; Pin preferred to stay in his small, gloomy office, working on scholarly articles, rather than endure the company of the writers, artists and composers who gathered around his wife. On the rare occasions Pin returned home, Vivian was either asleep or too busy with her friends to take any notice of her husband as he stole past to find refuge in his bedroom. Once Pin overheard Vivian reading aloud, in a ridiculously solemn tone, a love scene from Dancing in the Shadows to the hilarity of her guests.
Vivian’s extravagances inevitably depleted their small stock of savings, and she often resorted to applying to her father for loans, which she never disclosed to her husband. Lloyd Allenby, now in his eighties and in poor health, rarely refused her, though the tone of his letters to his daughter grew ever more querulous, demanding she provide him with a grandchild before he died. In February 1928, Vivian wrote to her father that she and Pin were expecting. Their daughter, Polyhymnia (Polly), was born in September of that year. Pin did not ask Vivian who the father was; he simply read all the books she had purchased in the last two years, at last coming across a suggestive love scene in the title story of the communist writer Francis X. McVeigh’s short-story collection The Red Flag (1928). Although Polly was not his, Pin loved the child. Vivian was distant, employing a nanny to look after Polly while she met with her literary friends for long lunches and dinner parties.
Pin lost his teaching post at the University of Queensland in July 1929 after his ecstatic review of Matilda Young’s collection Poems (1928) alienated the conservative vice-chancellor, who had ordered the book’s removal from the university library after reading its first three pages. From 1929 to 1937 the Darkblooms lived a peripatetic life, as Pin found, and lost, teaching work in universities and colleges across Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland. Matters were made worse by the bankruptcy of Allenby & Godwin in February 1932, and the suicide of Lloyd Allenby less than a month later. Allenby’s death meant the end of the “loans” that Vivian had relied on to fund her patronage. Although her father left her all his property and possessions, there was little remaining once his creditors had been paid off. Now wholly reliant on Pin’s modest salary, Vivian complained to her husband about his habit of losing perfectly good jobs because of the silly articles he insisted on writing, and demanded to edit them before they were submitted. Although Pin would grant his wife almost anything, he refused to acquiesce to this. In retaliation, Vivian be
came less discreet about her love affairs. In July 1935, when the Darkblooms were living in Perth, Vivian invited the novelist Alexander Fernsby to stay with her for a month at a hotel only a few minutes’ walk from Pin’s office. When Pin bumped into Fernsby in the street one day, Pin invited the novelist out for dinner, and brought along his first editions of the author’s Broken Sunlight (1925) and The King Died and Then the Queen Died of Grief (1928) to sign. Mortified, Fernsby left the next morning. The publication of Fernsby’s The Bloodshot Chameleon (1949), which fictionalised aspects of Fernsby’s liaison with Vivian, confirmed Pin’s suspicions that their youngest daughter Urania (Rainy), born in November 1935, was not his but Fernsby’s. As with Polly, Pin kept this knowledge from Rainy for as long as he lived.
In 1937 an anti-Stratfordian was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney. Pin, on the strength of his critical publications, was offered a senior lectureship in the English department. To his wife’s elation, the Darkblooms returned to Sydney towards the end of the year, and Vivian lost no time in setting up her salon once again, keeping open house for the city’s intelligentsia. Her affairs were marked by the publication of poems, plays and novels written in her honour, always featuring a sensuous, tall, dark-haired woman. One of Vivian’s innumerable conquests was Rand Washington, then at the beginning of his long career as a science-fiction writer. Their relationship lasted for a tempestuous month in 1939, resulting in the novel Vivyan of Cor, in which the hero, Buck Whiteman, is lured away from his Princess BelleFemme Blanch by a “marble-skinned brunette temptress”. The novel is notable for its tender (if mawkish) treatment of romantic love, almost unique in Washington’s oeuvre. After Vivian ended the affair, Washington responded by writing the sadistic fever dream Torturers of Cor (1940), in which Vivyan is captured and slowly dissected alive by the villainous Argobolin. Washington also claimed credit for a joke about Vivian Darkbloom that made the rounds of the Sydney literati in 1939 and 1940: